At Essex County Council, building a workforce that’s representative of the community it serves – and fostering a culture where staff feel supported to celebrate their diversity and “bring their whole selves to work” – are at the heart of the local authority’s agenda.
A newly launched equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategy sets out ambitious targets and the means to achieve them, including improved use of data to track what is and isn’t working on increasing diversity among the workforce, and prompt new interventions. There’s a strong focus on increasing the numbers of employees who declare protected characteristics such as disability (where the current identified proportion of employees is lower than in the county as a whole), and a “women in leadership” programme to tackle the underrepresentation of women in senior roles, given that across the organisation as a whole, it is predominantly female. Meanwhile, pay gap reporting will be expanded to include ethnicity and disability.
